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A Local Area Network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office, or group of buildings. Current LANs are most likely to be based on switched IEEE 802.3 Ethernet running at 10, 100 or 1,000 Mbit/s or on Wi-Fi technology . The defining characteristics of LANs in contrast to WANs are: their much higher data rates; smaller geographic range; and that they do not require leased telecommunication lines.

Interconnecting three or more sites across a metro or wide area network has traditionally been accomplished via a hub and spoke network topology using Private Lines, Frame Relay or IP VPNs over the Internet. Ethernet services support hub and spoke topologies but also support an “any-to-any” network topology similar to a LAN but delivered over a wide area. This latter capability is unique to Ethernet services and cannot be cost effectively delivered using legacy point-to-point technologies such as Frame Relay or IP VPNs.
This paper discusses two options for multi-site connectivity using Ethernet services. One option discusses the classical hub and spoke topology using Ethernet Virtual Private Lines (EVPL). The other option discusses the “any-to-any” topology using an Ethernet Private LAN (EP-LAN) service. Through examples, the paper illustrates the capabilities of the two approaches and their benefits.

Data connectivity has long been a necessity for enterprises big and small, as has the need to use that connectivity to extend enterprise Local Area Network (LAN) across networks. But the process of building an enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) is anything but easy.

Examine the three broad challenges that Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) face today: compliance and risk management,
consolidation and innovation. To address these effectively, FSIs require an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure that offers both the security and reliability of their legacy communications systems as well as the flexibility and scalability that new generation networks provide, in order to adapt and innovate in the highly competitive financial services environment.

There are now a variety of alternatives when it comes to connecting multiple sites with WAN links. Multi Protocol Label Switching is fast gaining popularity for many businesses as their preferred choice when it comes to creating a Virtual Private Network (VPN) over WAN. This paper will discuss the differences between MPLS and IPSec, and the benefits achieved from migrating to MPLS.

To enable always-on application access and business connectivity, you need a rock-solid network foundation. The increasingly complex, dynamic and fluid relationship between networks and devices requires a new approach to IP Address Management (IPAM) – one that unifies mobile security, address management, automation and self-service to provide actionable network intelligence and a broad span of control. This paper discusses the critical role of IPAM in providing a smarter way to connect mobile devices, applications, virtual environments and clouds.

When rack-mounted servers first appeared on the scene in the 1990s, they offered considerable advantages over the behemoth boxes they replaced. Their small, standardized footprint went a long way toward making data centers easier to manage. In the ensuing decades, form factor size and compute power have had an inverse relationship.
Their universal standardization earned them the nickname “pizza box” servers, and it was a key driver of the scale-out computing model popular in the early 2000s. Populating a rack of eight servers and either clustering them or implementing failover from one to the other was far easier than previously possible.

In recent years Boston College has experienced rapid growth in data center network complexity. This complexity was driven by the need to provide a high level of fault tolerance to new, multi-tiered applications that had large bandwidth requirements. Read the case study to learn how the university deployed Riverbed Cascade™ to improve application performance management and increase network uptime.

International Herald Tribune (IHT) needed to ensure that all of its journalists, regardless of their location, have network access 24x7 to meet their demanding editorial schedule. Read the case study to learn how IHT deployed Riverbed Cascade™ to gain insight into their WAN traffic and a true end-to-end view of the application delivery path from servers to desktops.

Riverbed® Cascade Shark provides continuous, high-speed packet capture to ensure that packet-level information is available when needed for granular, real-time and post-event forensic analysis. Based on high-performance 1GbE and 10GbE capture cards, Cascade Shark is capable of sustained line-rate, multi-gigabit per second recording of network traffic.

To deliver IT performance, you need complete visibility. Riverbed Cascade offers a superior network performance management solution for discovering, monitoring and troubleshooting your network and your critical applications. Now you can resolve performance problems before they impact the business, while lowering your IT management costs. Cascade has an elegant and simple design that deploys easily in complex environments and provides true integration across the Cascade family. This cleaner architecture means superior visibility, management and troubleshooting, saving our customers both capex and opex. According to IDC, Cascade customers typically experience an 83% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR)

This guide includes a demonstration on how you can accelerate troubleshooting, gain end-to-end visibility, and solve intermittent performance problems without having to recreate them; a detailed case study that shows how a large-scale federal government and defense consultant solved a months-long problem in just 15 minutes; and an on-demand webinar that introduces you to Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot.

Riverbed IT performance solutions allow you to align IT with the business objectives, accelerate applications and manage performance across the entire corporate network - at the data center, in the cloud, at branch offices, and for mobile workers. Businesses run faster and more efficiently, saving time and cutting the cost of infrastructure.

How to effectively troubleshoot your VDI deployment Virtual desktop infrastructure has come a long way since the first steps were taken a decade ago to run desktop workloads in the data center.
While more pervasive today, VDI technologies are latency-sensitive, and wholly dependent on the network. Complaints of poor end-user experience persist, especially over the WAN at branch offices where bandwidth constraints and latency delays are common.
But there is a way to ensure consistent and reliable VDI performance to deliver:
Reduced downtime
Faster troubleshooting
Improved SLAs
Enhanced planning and control
Read this brief to learn how the Riverbed® Cascade® application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution unlocks VDI visibility.

As a network manager, application manager or security manager, you need systems in place that can collect data across your WAN, continuously analyze the data to discover problems, and allow you to troubleshoot issues as soon as they occur. A packet capture and analysis solution is an essential part of your toolset, since it provides the most granular level of information and can help troubleshoot the toughest problems. Riverbed Cascade has fundamentally changed the economics of network performance management. Learn more..

Enterprises are rapidly adopting virtualization for dynamic service delivery and service management agility. IT challenges already exist in virtual environments and will only be exacerbated with the higher adoption of virtualization. The ability to proactively monitor traffic within these environments is critical for enabling predictable and reliable delivery of applications and for troubleshooting diverse IT infrastructures. Read this white paper to learn more.

Read this white paper to separate the technology and business potential from the marketing fluff. Get answers to your most pressing cloud questions and better understand when and where the cloud makes the most sense for your organization.

Today's IT organizations are faced with the daunting task of optimizing all aspects of their departments, including people, processes and technology. Optimizing and streamlining server utilization through virtualization represents one particularly exciting example. We found that one of the most popular usage models for virtualization is to drive down server procurements in development, test and production environments. When this model is followed, future server purchases are avoided; instead, new workloads are established on existing systems.